My Two Italies by Joseph Luzzi

To my great delight My Two Italies is as good and fascinating as its premise. With much warmth and human feeling, Prof. Luzzi weaves two particular strands of Italy: the Grand Tour, Ruskin-in-hand, sprezzatura (genius) Italy and the hardscrabble, sun-scorched, Fourteen Years as Age of Consent south. His parents and older siblings were born in the mezzogiornio (midday sun south) - geographically of course the same country as the cultural trinity of Venice-Florence-Rome but somehow a universe away. When the parents escape to the States for a better economic future they are neither former Italians nor future Italian-Americans. Instead the parents remain steadfastly Calabrese.

The good side of this would be the exquisite-sounding, pre-movement Slow Food meals. Their quotidian dinners today would be the cover story on a glossy food or travel magazine.

The bad side, though, is a tough, old-school father who ostracized his daughter because she dared to want to move out and have her own place - at age 27.

Given Prof. Luzzi's ancestry it seems to surprise even him that he develops such a passion for northern Italy art and literature. Yet he reminds the reader that there's a tremendous legacy of culture in the south as well; he describes a Naples museum in which he was the only visitor in a room filled with important works of art. Memories of scrimmaging through the Uffizi make the solitude alone sounds enormously appealing.

On an early student trip to Florence he's taken aback when a northern girl says of his parents' region, "That's not Italy - that's Africa!" The (intended) putdown made me wonder what the father thought of African-Americans. Was he sympathetic to their plight as a fellow outsider, or did he believe that they should just work hard like he did and quit whining? In short, did the old man realize that no matter how poor his English or olive his skin, being not-black offered a slender strand of advantage in the United States?

The author makes self-deprecating remarks about his academic chops, claiming to lack both the work habits of the A students and the free spirits of the C students. In fact he's a wonderfully gifted writer with a lovely sprinkling of sprezzatura of his own.